Research Scientist - NLP

Kensho is S&P Global's hub for AI innovation and transformation. With expertise in Machine Learning and data discovery, we develop and deploy novel solutions for S&P Global and its customers worldwide. Our solutions help businesses harness the power of data and Artificial Intelligence to innovate and drive progress. Kensho's solutions and research focus on speech recognition, entity linking, document extraction, automated database linking, text classification, natural language processing, and more.

Are you looking to solve hard problems and enjoy working with teammates with diverse perspectives? If so, we would love to help you excel here at Kensho. We are a collaborative group of experienced Research Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers, whose academic backgrounds include doctorate degrees in NLP, theoretical physics, statistics, etc. We take pride in our team-based, tightly-knit startup-like Kenshin community, which fosters continuous learning and a communicative environment.

At Kensho, we hire talented people and give them the freedom, support, and resources needed to accomplish our shared goals. We believe in flexibility-first and give our employees the opportunity to work from where they feel most productive and engaged (must be in the United States). We also value in-person collaboration, so there may be times when travel to one of our Kensho hubs (e.g., Cambridge, MA or NYC) will be required for team meetings or company events.

About the R&D Lab :

Since 2022, we have been building a world-class R&D lab comprised of NLP Research Scientists, and we heavily prioritize publishing in top-tier conferences. Our small team has demonstrated compelling results and is fueling innovation throughout Kensho and S&P Global at large. Specifically, we are continuously developing Large Language Models (LLMs) and are actively working on long-context question-answering (QA), complex reasoning, tokenization, alignment (e.g., factuality), multi-document QA, and more!

Our small team has reserved access to hundreds of fast GPUs (A100s), spanning Cloud and on-prem machines.

Our current projects include :

• Long-context document QA , where the answer is contained within documents that are hundreds of pages in length
• Complex reasoning , including better understanding and improving models' ability to approximate numbers (related to commonsense reasoning).
• Creating rigorous evaluation benchmarks , spanning domain knowledge, quantity extraction, and program synthesis
• Improving existing alignment techniques for domain-specific needs, while also addressing factuality
• Dissecting tokenizers to better understand how each of the sub-components impact intrinsic and extrinsic performance
• Multi-Document QA where the answer requires combining information from dozens of sources.
• Retrieval-augmented generation ( RAG ) methods
• Creating high-quality data filters for LLM development

Additionally, we maintain strong relationships with academia, including collaborating on several ongoing projects, providing industry grants, sponsoring conferences, and jointly holding faculty positions.

Kensho states that the anticipated base salary range for the position is 150k-225k. In addition, this role is eligible for an annual incentive bonus and equity plans. At Kensho, it is not typical for an individual to be hired at or near the top of the range for their role and compensation decisions are dependent on the facts and circumstances of each case.

Technologies & Tools We Use :

What You'll Do :

What You'll Need :

At Kensho, we pride ourselves on providing top-of-market benefits, including :

We are an equal opportunity employer that welcomes future Kenshins with all experiences and perspectives. Kensho is headquartered in Cambridge, MA, with an additional office location in New York City. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, or national origin.

Salary : $4,000